Thursday, March 21, 2013

F2P and Crafting

A while back I noted that, unlike other professions, crafting armor and weapons was in conflict with content rewards. Today I realized that for F2P games, crafting is very often in conflict with main monetization scheme.

A lot of games sell cosmetic armor and weapons. In a subscription game, these might have been one of the items that crafters could make. But a F2P is going to try and reserve as many of these as it can for the store. Cosmetic armor is something that sells, and is also something that is clearly not power, so you don't get grumbles about Pay2Win.

This is especially true in The Old Republic. In TOR, armor is composed of a shell and modifications can be inserted into the armor. The shell is entirely cosmetic, and all the power comes from the modifications. Naturally, TOR has taken this opportunity to sell a lot of cosmetic armor in its F2P offerings.

But that has diminished the armor and crafting professions. These professions can still make one type of modification, but their potential range of products has greatly diminished since the introduction of F2P.

For example, Armortech can only make Aim/Cunning armorings and augmentations, while Cybertech can make any type of enhancement and general mods, as well as earpieces.

In subscription games, armor and weapons crafting is very often in conflict with rewards from content, often making them a bad choice. In F2P games, these crafting professions are often in conflict with the F2P market. This marginalizes those professions even more, and makes them even less attractive.

I don't know what your opinion on why this is is; I wonder whether any encroaching on armor- and weaponsmithing's "territory" is more felt because the professions are already diminished by drops and by the fact the items they make are not consumable. (It didn't occur to me when writing my previous comment.)

LotRO has consumables for sale in the shop, but in general they either work in a different manner, or provide different buffs entirely then what crafters could produce. For example, the cash shop purchasable potions in LotRO give you a HoT effect, while the crafter ones are a direct heal.

LotRO also sells cosmetic gear that can't be crafted, but does sell consumable bundles that replicate crafting materials in exchange for binding the product to you.